Trump Chooses the Alt-Right Over the R.N.C.

Donald Trump meets last month with his National Hispanic Advisory Council.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GERALD HERBERT / AP

On August 20th, the Republican National Committee sent out a press release announcing that Donald Trump would be meeting with a recently formed “National Hispanic Advisory Council for Trump.” The Republican Presidential nominee has fared so poorly in the Hispanic community that G.O.P. ads targeting Hispanic voters use the tagline “Sí, yo estoy con Trump” (Yes, I’m with Trump), an apparent nod to the shock of Hispanics revealing their preference for a candidate who has described Mexican immigrants as “rapists”; banned Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network, from covering his events; and claimed that a federal judge of Mexican descent could not fairly preside over a fraud case against him.

The meeting with the council took place at Trump Tower, around a giant boardroom table that looked like it could have been part of the “Apprentice” set. It was one of the Trump campaign’s first photo ops under its new manager, Kellyanne Conway, and C.E.O., Stephen Bannon, who come from different and often opposing wings of the conservative movement. Conway, a longtime Republican pollster who previously worked for Ted Cruz’s campaign, has been trying to improve Trump’s image among more moderate Republicans, especially suburban women. Until August, Bannon was the chairman of Breitbart News, which under his tenure turned into a propaganda arm for Trump and a forum for the neo-white-nationalist movement that has rebranded itself as the “alt-right.”

At the Hispanic Advisory Council meeting, Ramiro Peña, a Texas pastor and one of Trump’s new associates, led the group in prayer. “Bless this building, bless this meeting and our time together, in the strong name of Jesus,” he said, video of the meeting shows, as Trump and the others bowed their heads. “Amen.”

Soon after the meeting, Buzzfeed and Univision, quoting participants, reported that Trump had told the group that he was open to rethinking his hard-line positions on immigration, especially his promise to forcibly deport the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants residing in the United States. “Trump now says he plans to legalize some undocumented immigrants,” Univision said.

Over the following ten days, Trump and his advisers mused publicly about “softening” his approach to undocumented immigrants and seemed to consider backing some version of a path to legalization. According to various reports, officials at the R.N.C. had painted a dire picture of Trump’s electoral prospects, and senior campaign advisers, including Chris Christie, had pressed Trump to moderate some of his most infamous positions.

The debate within the Trump campaign and the broader Republican Party was serious enough that, last week, Trump postponed a planned speech on immigration. When he finally spoke in Phoenix, last night, the speech became the greatest test of a theory that has taken hold among many elected officials who support Trump, even though they disagree with him on numerous issues: that Trump is malleable, that his policies can be shaped by establishment leaders, and that they can stamp out the white-identity politics that have given the Trump campaign its ballast.

Trump listened to and was pressured by many voices and groups hostile to—or at least skeptical of—his views on immigration: Conway, Christie, the R.N.C., his Hispanic advisers, the business community. And yet he still chose Bannon over Conway, the alt-right over the R.N.C., and ended up where he started, with a policy whose heart is deporting eleven million people, which would be one of the largest resettlements of human beings in modern history. He promised to “create a new special deportation task force” to remove undocumented citizens, insisted that “anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation,” and, for new immigrants, vowed to create “new screening tests for all applicants that include an ideological certification.” Rather than one issue among many, Trump made mass deportation the central premise of his candidacy, declaring that “all energies of the federal government and the legislative process must now be focussed on immigration security.”

It was a clarifying moment for all who have endeavored to understand Trump. In case it wasn’t obvious before, he means what he says. He was not just cynically catering to the nativist right during the primaries. If that were the case, by now he would have come up with a plan that integrated some mainstream Republican thinking on immigration and perhaps lifted his political fortunes. Instead, his speech was cheered by the likes of Ann Coulter and David Duke.

As for the members of his much-hyped National Hispanic Advisory Council, many are reportedly planning to resign. In an e-mail obtained by Katie Glueck, of Politico, Peña, the Texas pastor who led the Trump meeting in prayer, condemned the candidate. “I am so sorry but I believe Mr. Trump lost the election tonight,” he wrote. “The ‘National Hispanic Advisory Council’ seems to be simply for optics and I do not have the time or energy for a scam.”

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.